TURTLE MOUNTAIN RESERVATION, NORTH DAKOTA—Drive the long, straight roads of north-central North Dakota, and you pass lake after lake, amid hay fields and forests. Migratory birds, attracted by the abundance of water and grain, pause here. Farmers, boaters, and fishermen orient their lives around the pure water.
The water, more than anything, explains why members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians acted so quickly when they learned their region was next in line for fracking. Within just a few weeks of the tribal women’s meeting on the topic in late 2011, the council banned fracking on the 77,000-acre reservation. Their ban was among the first in North America, and it has since been upheld by succeeding tribal councils.
The process started in November 2011 when an elder, Carol Davis, called the women of the Turtle Mountain Tribe together. Fracking was booming on the Fort Berthold Reservation just a couple hundred miles away, and Davis had heard that the Turtle Mountain Reservation could be next. In the tribe’s tradition, women are responsible for protecting the water, so she invited the women to discuss fracking over a meal.
“I didn’t want to go,” Christa Monette told me when I met her at a restaurant in the tribe’s Sky Dancer Casino, where she works in the gift shop. “But then my sister said, ‘They’re having supper!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I suppose.’ ”
When she first heard about fracking in Fort Berthold, Monette thought an oil and gas boom on her remote reservation would be a good thing. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, how lucky they are! How come we can’t strike oil here?’ ” But after Davis explained her concerns to the group of women, Monette and her half-sister, Cedar Gillette, decided they needed to learn more about the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
At a second meeting, Davis offered each of the women a tobacco leaf, telling them to accept it only if they were committed to work on the issue. Monette took the tobacco reluctantly: She was a single mother of three, working full time. But the more the women—and the men who joined them—learned about fracking, the more worried they became.
They learned how the process works—that large amounts of water mixed with chemicals, salts, and sand are forced deep into the ground to shatter rock in order to release methane and oil. They learned that the procedure results in large volumes of wastewater and contaminated materials. And they learned that the drilling would go right through their precious aquifer, risking contamination of drinking water and lakes. If that happened, cleanup could be impossible. They also learned about Dimock, Pennsylvania, where a well explosion and contaminated groundwater were linked to fracking.
Another dimension makes this issue personal for Gillette and Monette. The half-sisters have parents on the two reservations, and each of them has spent time in both Fort Berthold and Turtle Mountain. “I didn’t want both my homelands to be fracked,” Gillette said.
Armed with this knowledge, Gillette, Monette, and others in the Turtle Mountain group brought their findings to the Turtle Mountain Tribal Council on November 2, 2011.
“People were stunned when we presented the facts,” Gillette said.
The council called a second meeting and invited the entire community. At that meeting, the council unanimously voted to ban fracking.
“What is sacred to our tribe is water,” tribal chairman Richard McCloud told me when I met him in his office on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. “We all know that in the very near future, water will be more valuable than oil or gold or anything else.
“This area is where our ancestors did their farming; the springs run through here, and this is how generations survived. The fracking ban will protect our water so future generations can continue to survive.”
Still, for Gillette, the meeting was tense. “I didn’t believe [the ban] would pass until they all said yes,” she said. After all, the elected council of an impoverished tribe was voting to leave millions of dollars on the table.
What the sisters didn’t know when the fracking ban passed was that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been on the brink of opening Turtle Mountain land for oil and gas leasing. The tribe’s action put a halt to the leasing.
Four years later, in early 2015, the tribal council adopted a new water code that solidifies the tribe’s stance on fracking.
McCloud said he has no regrets when I asked him about the money the tribe could have received in drilling royalties.
“I’m a small-business owner. I make my money the old-fashioned way,” he stated. “I earn it.” McCloud said he tracks the news on the Fort Berthold Reservation. “Whoever said money buys happiness, I have yet to see that.”
The Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe is turning to wind and solar instead of fracking. This windmill helps power the Turtle Mountain Community College.
Before I left Turtle Mountain, I decided to follow Monette’s advice and visit the reservation’s community college. I wasn’t sure why she had urged me to go there, but as soon as I turned off the highway and drove up the approach road, I understood. The college sits next to one of the many tree-lined lakes that dot the reservation. And standing tall above the college is a windmill. The windmill helps supply electricity to the college, but it also suggests what’s possible. The area has been rated Class 5 for wind potential, and the tribe is working with support from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the abundant wind—and solar—energy resources of the reservation.
Gillette is now attending law school with a focus on environmental law. Monette is still on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, still a busy working mom, except she’s now the main administrator of the “No Fracking Way Turtle Mountain” Facebook page, where she posts not only about her reservation but also about others around the world resisting fossil fuel extraction.
The resource-rich West faces a choice about the future: continue the extraction and expand the sacrifice zones, or take the route that Gillette, Monette, and many of the ranchers and Native people favor—phase out dependence on extractive mining and drilling industries, and convert to a sustainable, or even a restorative, economy.
The extraction industries will incur job losses. The coal industry is already in decline, and low oil prices have slowed the oil boom as well. There are only about 1,300 jobs in the coal industry in Montana, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.1 The state’s outdoor recreation industry, by contrast, employs 64,000.2
But there is potential for much more. A new, even larger workforce will be needed for the new economy. Restorative grazing and soil management, and renewable energy generation and conservation require larger numbers of skillful workers than do current practices. And the jobs created this way aren’t the boom-and-bust sort that disrupt communities, create the conditions for crime, and then leave contaminated land and water in their wake.
This restorative economy will be of little use to transnational corporations and Wall Street banks because much of the profit will come in forms that can’t be readily extracted from the region. Instead, the benefits will flow right back to the communities: Clean water for drinking and irrigation. Clean air. Fewer inducements for the unscrupulous to turn to corruption and crime. Livelihoods that are anchored on the land and a renaissance for rural communities. This approach contributes to solving the climate crisis. And it means healthier, longer lives, and enhanced quality of life for generations to come.
Plaque at Turtle Mountain Community College.
When people have a chance to study, discuss, and decide on options, they favor this sustainable path. A majority of Americans said they would be willing to pay more for electricity generated via renewables, for example, according to a New York Times/CBS poll.3 Sixty percent favor developing alternatives to fossil fuel, according to the Pew Research Center.4
The extraction industries win many of their battles anyway, though, because they have so much money to throw at the political process—something most communities don’t have. Still, local communities do have power, often more than they know. When the Montana ranchers and Native people stood together in front of the state legislature and at the U.S. Congress, they commanded attention. They spoke with authority because they are from, and of, the place that would be dynamited, excavated, and mined. And when it’s their own backyard at stake, there is a fierceness about the activism, a willingness to do the hard work of poring over documents, mobilizing neighbors, and pressing for action from decision makers. There’s also a willingness to reach out across barriers of race and culture to build the strength that can counter outside interests.
These communities become even more powerful as they develop their own vision for their future. Steve Charter believes that ranching that builds the ecological health of the soil can conserve scarce water resources, sequester carbon, enhance the productivity of the land, and create the foundation for a rural renaissance. He imagines a rebirth of small towns and land-based livelihoods as the labor-intensive techniques of restorative agriculture and ranching replace the chemical-intensive, soil-depleting, drought-intolerant techniques of agribusiness.
Likewise, the Native people I spoke to are relying on their treaty rights to protect the water resources and fisheries that can sustain future generations. As they restore their traditional ways, and bring in modern technologies and economies that suit their values, they are restoring their communities and becoming an increasingly powerful force for environmental protection.
Much of the focus of climate activism has been on national and international policy. But the local work is having a big impact. Restorative ranching, resistance to mining and fracking, and the protection of water and soil is best done by the people who live rooted in a place, rooted in relationships with others from that place, working out together how to be of and with a healthy, evolving ecosystem. I began to see the power of these people who know and care for their place and are willing to stand up for it.
A Culture of Connection |
An Economy of Extraction |
Restorative: We harvest but leave our place more alive and healthy than we found it. |
Extractive: I profit by what I can take from the forests, water, and soil. |
Earth, water, and life are sacred. |
Natural resources are to be used to fuel our economy and build wealth. |
Rooted: We are nourished by our place, and it supports us. |
I am nimble and efficient, taking what I need and then moving on. |
Our way of life and culture is informed by place. |
Exiled: I can live anywhere but feel at home nowhere. |
We are attached to our homes and resist displacement. |
The market will determine who lives where, and who can afford a home. |
Commons (water, air, climate stability, soil) belong to everyone, all beings, and all generations—it’s our job to protect them. |
Commons don’t exist; everything is owned by individuals or government, or is available for dumping. |
To be educated means to acquire deep learning about our place, including those aspects with no immediate benefit to humans. |
Being well educated about a place means knowing how to efficiently extract its potential wealth. |
We the people LOVE this place. |
A romantic notion of place can interfere with an economy based on extracting value from land, water, forests, and soil. |
Long-term well-being for generations to come is our responsibility, just as our ancestors provided that to us. |
The corporate economy’s time frame is short-term; the finance economy’s is micro-seconds. |
We look for ways to create livelihoods for upcoming generations, and value the vibrant communities that result. |
Efficient, profitable economies replace human labor with technology; “community” has no economic value. |
